Advantages of Green Diesel Over Bio-diesel.

What is "green" diesel and how is it different from bio-diesel?

Almost everyone has heard of bio-diesel and most of us know that it is fuel made from plant or animal material, usually plant material is grown specially for the purpose of making fuel.

Wiki describes it as follows:

Biodiesel refers to a vegetable oil or animal fat based diesel fuel consisting of long-chain alkyl (methyl, propyl or ethyl) esters. Biodiesel is typically made by chemically-reacting lipids (e.g., vegetable oil, animal fat (tallow)) and alcohol.

Biodiesel is meant to be used in standard diesel engines and is thus distinct from the vegetable and waste oils used to fuel converted diesel engines.

On Wiki, I could find no definition for green diesel however I think there is an important distinction to be made here.

Green diesel is chemically different than bio diesel, and it can be made from waste streams destined for landfill. It's green because it is preventing waste from going to landfill, and it's green because its "well to wheels" GHG footprint is the lowest of all fuels.

What is often overlooked in bio diesel is just how much fossil fuel is used to create it and just how much GHG are released from the time land is cleared and planted to the time the bio diesel is used in an engine. Following its life cycle, soy oil creates more than twice the green house gas emissions of green diesel made from biomass, according to a study by MIT researcher HM Wong.

The process to produce green diesel is very different from how bio diesel is made.

To make green diesel, waste and or biomass is first sorted to remove recyclables and other undesirable elements. It is then gasified at very high temperatures (10,000-12,000 degrees C.) where the molecular bonds are broken and then the syngas that is produced is passed over a catalyst at elevated temperatures. (More details of this process can be found at www.alternativefuelscorp.com )

The process was developed by two German scientists over 80 years ago, is well documented and is seen by many scientists and energy analysts as one of the most likely to succeed alternative fuel. In South Africa, 30% of the fuel is produced using this process.

Typically Fischer Tropsch, as the process is known, is used to convert coal and natural gas to liquid fuels, so the 1st generation process itself is not considered green because it is not sustainable, emits large amounts of CO2 and the raw materials are fossil based.

However using biomass or waste, 2nd generation Fischer Tropsch creates an ultra clean fuel from a sustainable source and can be set up to produce no emissions.

So what are the benefits of green diesel over bio diesel?

1. There is no competition between crops and fuels over land use. In fact when using waste, land that would be used for landfill could be freed up to produce food crops or for other uses. It is estimated that if every acre of arable land in the USA was put to producing fuels, it would supply no more than 10% of what is needed every year.
2. The other issue in the area of land use is one of soil cycles. How many times can you keep planting the same land with the same crops before the land becomes exhausted? Yes you can add fertilizer, but that again is mostly fossil derived and the run-off pollutes our rivers and lakes.
   
3. The fuels produced by Fischer Tropsch also include a gasoline fraction and these fuels contain no sulphur, no particulates, no aromatics and no nitrous compounds, making them very clean burning and reducing the production of acid rain. Green diesel does not create the black smoke we all have experienced when driving behind trucks because it contains no particulates.
   
4. Green diesel can be used in any diesel engine without modification. Other fractions can be used to run aircraft engines. This means that we can run cars, trucks, trains, boats, planes and generators on FT fuels without exacerbating GHG levels.
5. Landfill waste is a problem for which there is no immediate solution. It costs north America about $80 billion dollars to bury a billion barrels of oil each year. As standards of living around the world improve, so does the volume of waste and at present waste seems inexhaustible. So this is truly a renewable fuel with far greater environmental benefits than bio-diesel. See my June 17th 2009 blog posting for details about recycling at the molecular level.
   
6. Green diesel produced from BTL (biomass to liquids) or WTL (waste to liquids) doesn't smell like fossil diesel. In fact it has a pleasant kind of soap smell. So its not unpleasant either on the road or at the fuel pump. Bio diesel reputedly smells like french fries when used in engines, I'm not sure I want to be riding behind that first thing in the morning, but perhaps that's just me.
   
7. In cold climates green diesel has a great advantage over bio-diesel. It doesn't cloud or gel until much lower temperatures (-40C) making it ideal for cool climates like Canada and the mid-west of the US. Imagine having to warm your fuel before starting out on a cold morning!
   
8. Because it has exactly the same chemical properties as fossil based diesel, it can be blended with regular diesel, stored and distributed using the same infrastructure.
   
9. Although chemically identical to fossil diesel, it has a higher cetane rating and on a gallon for gallon basis contains 22% more energy.
   

All in all with all these advantages I believe this makes green diesel a pretty good alternative.

• It's cleaner
• It's greener
• It's sustainable

Let me know what you think.

What is recycling at the molecular level?

We owe the quality of our lives to our ability take resources and turn them into products we need.

The products we need are then used or consumed and what we don't want is thrown out.

What we throw out goes to be recycled or land filled. Less than 50 % of what we dispose of is recycled, the rest is dumped in landfill for future generations to worry about.

Most of us acknowledge that landfills are a necessary evil, what we don't question much are the alternatives to landfill.

The way we handle waste today assumes waste is a liability.
What if we were to assume that waste is a valuable distributed energy resource? It in fact contains, on a ton for ton basis, about 50% of the energy of coal.

How would we handle it then?

It would become clear that disposal is the lowest level of use for a resource. Incineration is little better. Granted, we can use the energy we generate to fire kilns or create steam for generators, but in reality this is very low level recovery.

We can improve our ability to recycle and I think this is happening all the time, but much of what goes to land fill is beyond recycling as it is currently done. It is a mixture of a wide range of materials, some of it rotting and odorous, much of it is moist and each component contaminates the other components. So what do we do with this stuff?

We tend to think of recycling at a product level. Paper is recyclable, metal is recyclable, glass is recyclable and so are plastics. But what if we look at this material at the molecular level?

Much of what goes to landfill has high levels of carbon. Items such as organics, paper, plastics fibres, carpeting, wood rubber and even asphalt shingles all contain carbon along with hydrogen and oxygen. These elements are bound together in a variety of complex compounds often containing other elements as well.

But instead of thinking about this material at a product level, what if we viewed it at the molecular level? We'd see that it contains valuable energy and compounds which can be transformed into other valuable resources.

We can take this material, vaporize it so it breaks down to its basic molecules. Once we've done this, we can produce what is known as syngas. Syngas is a combination of carbon monoxide and hydrogen and these two components can be used to make a wide variety of valuable fuels and chemical feed stocks. These can either be used as fuels or used as resources to make other useful products.

This is recycling at the molecular level.

It assumes waste has value and in fact enables us to put a value on municipal solid waste. If one takes into account what can be made and sold from MSW, a rough back of the envelope calculation shows that each ton of garbage may be worth around $300 a ton. This technology exists, is available and will become the norm sometime in the near future. More can be learned about this process at www.alternativefuelscorp.com

If that's the case, what we dump in landfill in North America each year may be worth upwards of $70 billion.

Do we want to keep burying it in a hole in the ground or do we want to turn it into something useful, thereby cleaning up the environment, reducing methane escape into the atmosphere and eventually getting rid of landfill altogether?

Just how much energy is there in the waste we send to landfill?

• Estimates vary but somewhere between 1 and 2 billion tonnes of waste go to landfill each year in North America
• Landfill is our biggest single source of greenhouse gas. 37% of the methane generated in North America is generated by landfill.
• Methane is 21 times as powerful as CO2 as a greenhouse gas
• Each ton of solid waste contains about 50% of the energy contained in a ton of coal
• Only about 2% of the energy in waste sent to landfill is captured and used

For how long can we allow this travesty to continue?

We have to see waste, not as a liability to be disposed of as expediently as possible but as a domestic distributed source of energy. Once we achieve this, we can put up plants that are capable of transforming this waste into valuable forms of energy, such as electricity, fuels and chemical feedstocks, close to the supply of waste. What ever is needed in a particular market can then determine what each plant should be producing.

As citizens we need to demand that our local governments no longer send waste to landfill. This should be a last resort, not the default that it currently is. Most of them wont act until they have no way of avoiding it.

A Billion Barrels

Peak oil, the energy crisis, $4.00 gasoline, energy security are terms we've all become familiar with, yet right in our own back yard lie the equivalent of a billion barrels of oil. Its there for the taking.

Each day we send 1000s of tons of waste to landfill, and mostly think nothing of it.

Let me give you some figures that will shock you:

• We throw out 10% of the food we buy.
• Every day the average person throws out 4.5lbs of garbage.
• Every little baby generates about a ton of trash per year.

Despite our recycling efforts about 56% of what gets thrown out ends up in landfill. About 70% of this material contains carbon which can be reclaimed and turned into fuels, chemicals and electricity. This means the amount going to landfill could be reduced to about 16% with very positive effects on the environment.

Landfills are huge producers of greenhouse gases, predominantly methane which is about 30 times more damaging than carbon dioxide. In addition even in places where it is collected from landfill, about 46% escapes into the atmosphere.

Not only do these gases escape but dangerous chemicals and metals leach out and contaminate the ground water.

I'm not suggesting we burn the waste to create electricity, although in some instances that might be preferable. However I am suggesting that we look at non-burning solutions to convert the energy into useful forms. Where there is no burning, there are minimal emissions. In some cases this energy will be as electricity, in others it will be fuels or chemicals. In others it will be all three depending on what is needed in a particular market.

This waste contains valuable energy that can be used to power trucks, planes, cars and of course to generate electricity. All commodities which are vital to our survival, lifestyle and well being. Every year North Americans send over 1,000,000,000 tons of waste to landfill. If this could be converted to fuels, it would create a billion barrels of high quality fuels each year.

With the right choice of process, these fuels can be the cleanest around. They can be made so they contain no sulfur, no particulates, no aromatics and no nitrous compounds. These are all the things in fossil fuels that harm the environment. What's more research by MIT shows that fuels made from this kind of material produce extremely low greenhouse gases in their life cycle. Lower levels even than bio fuels.


This is what this blog is about. Waste is a fact of life, but it doesn't have to go to a hole in the ground. It can be turned into value added products that are in great demand.